The stormy affair of Josephine Baker at New York’s splashy Stork Club in the fall of 1951 was a brief-but-infamous incident and now a fascinating part of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund collection at the Library.
Baker’s angry showdown over an apparent race-based refusal of service at New York’s most exclusive club fills hundreds of pages of documents that show how the tempestuous star whipped up a high-profile protest in an era before segregation was nationally outlawed — only to see it go terribly wrong.
“She had it in her hands, everything she wanted,” Jean-Claude Baker wrote of his legal guardian/mother his 1993 biography, “Josephine: The Hungry Heart,” referring to her career decline that accelerated with the Stork Club incident. As her manager in the last decade of her life, he knew this terrain well. “And she blew it.”
You can see the LDEF’s files on Baker now from any computer anywhere. About 80 percent of the LDEF’s collection recently has been digitized, about 80,000 items from 1915 to 1968. This puts the Baker material alongside the civil rights organization’s nation-changing work in matters such as Brown v. Board of Education, the 1943 Detroit riot, the Emmett Till trial and many more cases of segregation and voting rights.
Baker’s night at the Stork Club (which did not serve Black customers unless they were celebrities, and not always even then) was on Oct. 16, a Tuesday. She entered the club near midnight after her show at the Roxy Theatre. She was with three socially prominent friends, both Black and white.
She made sure to say hello to Walter Winchell, the nation’s most popular newspaper and radio columnist, on the way to her table. He had fawned in print and on air about Baker’s segregation-busting appearance in Miami Beach’s Copa City Club months earlier. The Stork, owned by his friend Sherman Billingsley, was his night office.
Baker was one of the most famous women in the world that night, and arguably the most famous Black woman. She had overcome childhood poverty in St. Louis to become, at 19, an overnight Parisian sensation in “La Revue nègre” and starred the next year at the Folies-Bergére. She danced wearing little more than a skirt of fake bananas and several beaded necklaces. That risqué image of her became an iconic representation of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
It also catapulted her to international stardom as a multilingual singer, dancer, actress and performer. A temperamental diva onstage and off, she settled in France, became a citizen and gained gravitas by serving as a secret agent in World War II, for which she was highly decorated and greatly respected.
That night at the Stork, Baker’s party, leaving Winchell at his famous Table 50, was seated six or seven tables over and served drinks. Baker ordered a meal a few minutes later — steak and crab — but it was not served. Baker’s party was ignored by waiters. An hour passed.
Baker, fuming, left the dining room and called Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP. When she returned, her food was on the table, but she refused to eat it. Angry words were exchanged; Baker’s party stormed out.
The LDEF, led by White, mobilized support. Baker wrote President Harry Truman, who told aides to investigate. New York Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri said he would not “go into the Stork Club or any club that practices discrimination” and his Committee on Unity launched an investigation. Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, a huge star, entered the fray on Baker’s behalf. The American Jewish Congress asked the city to pull the club’s liquor license. Picket lines showed up outside the Stork.
White telegraphed the influential Actors’ Equity Association in New York: “May we solicit whatever action you deem wise and effective,” he wrote. “… We believe Equity’s connection with Stork Club television program would make action by you exceedingly valuable.”
Billingsley shot back in a terse one-pager to White that his club had always excluded “obnoxious” patrons and always would. It left little doubt in this context that “obnoxious” meant “Black.”
If Baker had just gone after the Stork Club, it’s likely she would have carried the day. In a 2000 book, “Stork Club: America’s Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society,” New York Times reporter and author Ralph Blumenthal wrote that the Baker scandal broke club’s charm and made it look like an anachronism. By 1965, it was out of business and broke. A year after that, Billingsley was dead of a heart attack.
Still, in 1951, Baker inexplicably had made a fatal mistake: She said that Winchell, who had often supported liberal causes, witnessed the entire spectacle and did nothing. This was likely not true — even a member of Baker’s party said Winchell had left before the incident’s ugly conclusion — and an escalation of catastrophic proportions.
Winchell took to print and the airwaves, telling his nationwide audience that he admired Baker but had indeed left before the incident. “I am appalled at the agony and embarrassment caused Josephine Baker and her friends at the Stork Club,” he said. “But I am equally appalled at their efforts to involve me in an incident in which I had no part.”
An infamously vicious man when angry, he went after Baker. He dug up her 1949 memoir (published in France) in which she had written derogatively about American Jews. He dug up older clips, showing that she had been a prewar fan of the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini. He whispered she might actually be a communist — a career-killing charge in the Cold War era.
Baker wasn’t cowed. The next week, in a handwritten letter on hotel stationery, Baker wrote White, saying that if she got her life story published, “all the money would come to the NAACP you must have money to carry on. I will sign the contract in the name of the NAACP.”
By early December, Baker’s attorney, Arthur Garfield Hays, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, was writing that the case was a symbolic moment for the nation.
The affair involved “issues much bigger than either Miss Baker or Mr. Billingsley,” he wrote. “… The real question is whether laws which provide against discrimination are to be enforced or are to be ignored.”
He also tried to slip in an apology to Winchell, saying that Baker now “accepted” that he had left the club before the incident, but it was far too little too late.
Baker had overplayed her hand. Winchell had badly damaged her reputation. The Mayor’s Committee on Unity, so eager to jump into the fray in October, dismissed the case in December, saying there was no evidence of a “charge of racial discrimination.”
White, the NAACP leader, was furious in his response: “Evidently your committee failed to probe into the Stork Club’s longstanding policy of excluding Negroes.”
Baker only made it worse, lambasting the U.S. while continuing her tour across the U.S. and Latin America, losing more friends and concert bookings in the process.
She remained undaunted, but her star was diminished. She spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 and in 1975 enjoyed a return to top-tier limelight with a comeback show in Paris. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage during the show’s run. She was 68.
Baker is today widely celebrated on any number of fronts, as her titanic personality far exceeded the world of entertainment. A U.S. stamp was issued in her honor in 2008. In 2021, she was honored with a memorial inside the Pantheon, France’s national mausoleum, the first Black woman to be so recognized.
“France is Josephine,” French President Emmanuel Macron said during the ceremony.
In her short speech at the March on Washington, Baker delivered a line that, over the years, has come to explain much about her career, including that night at the Stork Club.
“I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more,” she told the crowd of some 250,000. “But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth.”
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